^{Note 1 in page 49} For illuminating accounts of this tradition see especially Alastair C. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Eng., 1961); John Herman Randall, The School of Padua (Padua, 1961); Colin M. Turbayne, The Myth of Metaphor (New Haven, Conn., 1962); and Richard Mc-Keon, “Philosophy and the Development of Scientific Methods,” JHI, 27 (1966), 3–22. Crombie and Randall supply many passages showing the material of the tradition, Turbayne gives a very interesting account of the dynamics of the method of analysis and synthesis, and McKeon supplies the first detailed account of the variety and evolution of concepts of method.

^{Note 2 in page 49} Jean Hagstrum, Samuel Johnson's Literary Criticism (Minneapolis, Minn., 1952), p. 10. W. R. Keast, “The Theoretical Foundations of Johnson's Criticism,” in Critics and Criticism, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago, 1952), and Robert Voitle, Samuel Johnson the Moralist (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), have helped to show that Johnson, however unsystematic he may seem, was an insightful and consistent theorist. These authors trace related threads of theory in Johnson's writings and have done much to free his thought from a biographical and belletristic limbo. They each discuss Johnson's theory of knowledge (Hagstrum, pp. 18–20 and 29–37; Keast, pp. 170–78; and Voitle, pp. 3–20), but do not discuss the pattern of methodology I find to be one of the chief principles of Johnson's writings.

^{Note 3 in page 50} Samuel Johnson, The Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Alexander Chalmers, 12 vols. (London, 1810), xn, 25–26. Subsequent references to Johnson's works are to this edition and are made in the text.

^{Note 4 in page 50} I Bernard Cohen, Franklin and Newton (Philadelphia, 1956), pp. 222–29. Cohen does not cite the oration Johnson refers to and I have been unable to locate it; however, the derivation of this passage from the position expressed in “Query 31” of the Opticks is unmistakable.

^{Note 5 in page 50} Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks (New York, 1952), pp. 404–05.

^{Note 6 in page 50} Turbayne, pp. 28–53. See also McKeon, pp. 3–8, where a range of ancient concepts of method is indicated. Tur-bayne's work suggests that Plato taught the west to analyze inquiry and thus initiated methodology: Passages like the ones from the Republic cited here (see notes 7 and 8) are not found earlier to my knowledge.

^{Note 7 in page 50} Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans, and ed. C. M. Corn-ford (Oxford, 1945), VII, 534, pp. 253–54.

^{Note 8 in page 50} Plato, Republic, vi, 501–11, pp. 225–26.

^{Note 9 in page 50} Aristotle, Physics I.184a, 10–14, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York, 1941), p. 218.

^{Note 10 in page 50} See Richard Foster Jones, “Science and Criticism,” in The Seventeenth Century, ed. Richard Foster Jones (Stanford, Calif., 1965), p. 50. Interest in method as an indication of and route to progress in inquiry is well reflected in an observation made by William Wotton in 1698: “Now as this experimental and mechanical Method of Philosophizing laid down above, is right, so it is easie to prove that it has been carefully followed by Modern Philosophers. My Lord Bacon was the first great Man who took much pains to convince the World that they had hitherto been in a wrong Path, and that Nature her self, rather than her Secretaries, was to be addressed to by those who were desirous to know very much of her Mind. Monsieur Des Cartes, who came soon after, did not perfectly tread in his Steps, since he was doing most of his Work in his Closet, concluding too soon, before he had made Experiments enough; but then to a vast Genius he joined exquisite Skill in Geometry, and working upon intelligible Principles in an intelligent Manner; though he very often failed of one Part of his End, namely, a right Explication of the Phaenomena of Nature, yet by marrying Geometry and Physicks together, he put the World in Hopes of a Masculine Offspring in process of Time, though the first Productions should prove abortive. This was the State of Natural Philosophy, when those great Men who after King Charles IPs Restoration joined in a Body called by that Prince himself, the ROYAL SOCIETY, went on with the Design; they made it their Business to set their Members awork to collect a perfect History of Nature, in order to establish thereupon a Body of Physicks; what has been done towards it by the Members of that illustrious Body will be evident by considering that Boyle, Barrow, Newton, Huygens, Malpighius, Leeuwenhoek, Willoughby, Willis and Abundance more already named amongst the great Advancers of real Learning, have belonged to it.”

^{Note 11 in page 50} Francis Bacon, “Aphorism xix,” Novum Organum, trans. R. Ellis and James Spedding (London, n.d.), p. 64.

^{Note 12 in page 50} Bacon, “Aphorism cv,” p. 127.

^{Note 13 in page 50} The contrast between his view and Bacon's is clearly reflected in his criticism of Galileo's work in a letter to Mersenne in 1638: “I find, in general, that he [Galileo] philosophizes better than the usual run, and he gets away as much as he can from the errors of the Schools and tries to examine the problems of physics by mathematical reasoning. . . But it seems to me that he is continually wandering away from the point and does not explain any matter thoroughly; which goes to show that he has not examined the points in order and, without having considered the first causes of nature, he has merely looked for the causes of certain particular facts, building thus without any foundation.” Cited here as translated and quoted in L. J. Beck, The Method of Descartes (Oxford, 1952), pp. 241–12. For the French text see René Descartes, Œuvres de Descartes, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery (Paris, 1898), II, 380.

^{Note 14 in page 50} René Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, ed. E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (London, 1911), i, 14. “Method consists entirely in the order and disposition of the objects towards which our mental vision must be directed if we would find out any truth. We shall comply with it exactly if we reduce involved and obscure propositions step by step to those that are simpler, and then starting with the intuitive apprehension of all these that are absolutely simple, attempt to ascend to the knowledge of all others by precisely similar steps.”

^{Note 15 in page 50} Quoted here from C. M. Turbayne's synoptic translation in The Myth of Metaphor, pp. 36–37.

^{Note 16 in page 50} Bacon, p. 69.

^{Note 17 in page 50} Hagstrum, p. 11.

^{Note 18 in page 50} Arieh Sachs, Passionate Intelligence (Baltimore, Md., 1967), and Paul Alkon, Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline (Evanston, 111., 1968), study aspects of the unity of Johnson's thought with more attention to the inner workings of his discourse than has been given in the past with two exceptions: W. K. Wimsatt's Philosophic Words (New Haven, Conn., 1948) and my own unpublished doctoral dissertation “Johnson and Method in Criticism” (Rochester, 1967), which is indebted to Wimsatt's appreciation of Johnson's use of language and studies the various uses Johnson made of the concepts and idioms of method in his literary investigations.